The Price Of Silence. Kate Wilhelm
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Second by second, a much more elaborate special edition was reforming in Ruth Ann’s mind.
Usually Todd and Barney cooked dinner together, but since Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were her only really busy days, on those nights he most often made dinner and had it ready when she got home. That night, chilled again by the strong wind, she entered the house, then called out, “Fe, fi, fo, fum. That smells good and I want some.”
“Maniac,” he said from the kitchen. “Lasagna, ten minutes. Wash your hands.”
They ate at the kitchen table and she told him about the funeral. “There must have been a couple hundred people there. And I was freezing. That wind was brutal today.”
“I know. I walked down to Safeway. We need to get out our winter gear. Summer or winter here, no in-between apparently. Guess who I saw at Safeway.”
“I give already. Who?”
“Miss Sexpot herself. She wanted me to buy her a cup of coffee, to warm her up, she said.”
“Oh dear,” Todd said. “You’ll have to come by the office to borrow my whip and chair.”
“I told her I was mentally conjugating Greek verbs and couldn’t be distracted. You might try that line with Shinizer. It worked with the sexpot.”
“Two problems,” she said, shaking her head. “He wouldn’t know what conjugating means, and he doesn’t know a verb from a velocipede. Anyway, after I told him that what he claims is friendliness the law considers sexual harassment, he hasn’t come within ten feet of me. Deal. You take care of the sexpot and I’ll take care of the bum. I can, you know.”
“I know you can, tiger. Deal. What’s a velocipede?”
Grinning, she said, “It’s a two-wheeled horse that little boys rode in Victorian novels.”
He looked doubtful and she laughed and started to clear the table.
Todd was dreaming. She was standing on a vast dun-colored plain with not a landmark in sight, no grasses, no rocks, nothing, just the endless plain. A strong wind was blowing granules of ice at her and no matter how she twisted and turned, they kept blasting her in the face. She ducked her head and tried to protect her face, her eyes, but the wind was too strong. “Don’t cry,” she told herself. “Don’t cry.” Tears would freeze on her cheeks.
“Todd! Wake up!”
“Don’t cry,” she whimpered, struggling against the wind, weeping.
“Todd! Come on, wake up.”
She jerked awake with Barney’s hands on her shoulders. She was shaking with cold.
“A door must have blown open,” he said. “Where’s another blanket?”
She couldn’t stop shaking. “Closet shelf.” She pointed and pulled the covers tighter around herself. Barney hurried to the closet and yanked another blanket from the shelf, wrapped it around her. He was shivering, too.
“I’ll go close the door. Be right back.” Pulling on his robe, he left the room. She huddled under the covers, drew herself up into a ball, and realized that she was weeping, her face was wet. Even with the covers over her head, she couldn’t stop shivering, and she couldn’t stop crying.
Barney was back. “Come on,” he said. “This bedroom is like an icebox. I put a log on the fire. We’ll be warmer there.”
He had moved the sofa in front of the fireplace, where a hot fire was blazing. They sat holding each other on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, not talking. Gradually the warmth reached her and the shivering subsided, with only an occasional tremor coursing through her. Barney got up and left, returned with a box of tissues. “Are you okay?” he asked. At her nod, he said, “I’ll make us some hot cocoa. Be right back.”
She didn’t know how long they sat on the sofa before the fire, sipping the sweet hot cocoa. Eventually they moved the blanket away, but they didn’t get up.
Then, warm through and through, even sweating a little, she said, “There wasn’t an open door, was there?”
After a moment he said, “No. Why were you crying?”
“I don’t know,” she said in a low voice. “It wasn’t just me. You were freezing, too, weren’t you?”
“I was pretty damn cold,” he said, “but you were like ice. And crying. You were dreaming, crying in your dream. Do you remember the dream?”
Miserably she shook her head. She had to fight back tears, because sitting there with the fire, with Barney’s arm around her shoulders, safe and comfortable, she felt a nearly overwhelming sadness, a loneliness such as she had never experienced before. “Let’s go back to bed,” she whispered.
Ruth Ann was dreaming that she was a small child in the old press room where the machinery was gargantuan, high over her head, making ogrelike growling noises. Her father spread blank newsprint on the floor and she began to help him paste up the news stories, crawling over the paper on hands and knees. She had a paste pot and a brush and carefully brushed the paste on an article, then crawled around trying to find where to place it. Her mother said, “For heaven’s sake! Look at you. You’re all over ink.”
Ruth Ann stood up and looked at her knees and both hands, then stamped her foot, and her mother said, “Don’t you stamp your foot at me, young lady.”
She stamped her foot again and her father laughed as the newly pasted news stories came unstuck and scattered.
She woke up when the cold descended, and this time when Maria glided into the room carrying the electric blanket, Ruth Ann had already put on sheepskin slippers and a heavy wool robe.
“I won’t be going back to bed until this air mass moves on,” Ruth Ann said. “In fact, I was going to go make a cup of tea. I’ll make two cups.”
“It’s the shadow,” Maria said. “It moves out when it’s ready. I’ll put this on your bed in case you want it later.” Maria had on a heavy robe, but her feet were bare.
“I can’t understand why you don’t get cold when this happens,” Ruth Ann said in the kitchen a few minutes later, seated at the table sipping the tea she had insisted on making herself the way she liked it, black and strong, and in a big mug. Maria had a cup, half tea, half milk, the way she liked it.
“I get cold, but not like you do,” Maria said. “And Thomas Bird, he hardly notices it.”
“Strange,” Ruth Ann murmured. “I was thinking earlier how many things are strange. People think that when you get old you suddenly get smarter, or at least wiser, and I doubt that. You just have more memories.”
“Isn’t that what wiser means? More things to compare and weigh with?”
“You won’t get smarter,” Ruth Ann said. “You’re already too smart for your own good.”
“What other strange things were on your mind?” Maria asked.
Ruth Ann drew her robe tighter. She was very cold, but the tea was helping, and she knew the cold spell would not last very long. It never did. “Earlier,” she said, “when Todd was here we were looking at that picture of my mother and father, and I began to realize one of the reasons I like Todd and Barney so much. They remind me of my parents. Isn’t that strange?”
“Not how they look.”
“No. No. They don’t look at all like them. How they act, how playful they are together, trusting and honest. Things like that. Their attitude, I suppose.” She held her mug of tea, the heat felt good on her hands. “My parents were like that,” she said softly. “Laughing, playing, teasing a little. I think funerals make you think of such